Sarah Ann Henley's survival is a matter of well documented historical record rather than legend, her case reported at the time and preserved in the bridge's own archives, giving this a rare example within this register of a story whose central remarkable claim, a fall of some 75 metres survived largely intact, is genuinely verified rather than a matter of oral tradition alone.
The specific mechanism of her survival, her skirts acting as a parachute combined with landing in soft low-tide mud rather than deep water, offers a plausible physical explanation grounded in real period fashion and river conditions, distinguishing this case from more purely miraculous or unexplained survival stories, her extraordinarily long subsequent life to the age of 85 further underlining just how completely she recovered.
Henley's story stands in deliberate contrast to the bridge's separately recorded collective haunting of those who jumped and did not survive, her case recorded in this register's curse and omen category as a documented instance of extraordinary reversal of fortune at a site otherwise strongly associated with tragedy, her survival itself functioning within local memory as a kind of counter-legend to the bridge's darker reputation.
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